Kyle Shipe: Sport as ritual

While I was doing research for my paper, I found some very interesting articles. One of these was entitled "Sport as Ritual." This article looked at different aspects of rituals and apply different sports to them. Courage was seen through the sport of bullfighting as the matador takes a lot of effort to prove his worth to the crowd. Another aspect is gameness. The author defines this as, "The capacity to stick to a line of activity and continue to poor all effort into it regardless of set backs, pain, or fatigue." The sport of boxing is used to show gameness. Another aspect of sport as ritual is integrity or good sportsmanship. Composure is the last aspect given. Surfing is grouped into this as it takes a tremendous amount of composure to maintain oneself on a surfboard jetting through bumpy waves on the ocean. Overall sport can be seen as ritual, there is an intense amount of training and practicing that goes into sports and that in itself is a type of ritual.